Fossils found in Israel indicate that mysterious archaic people still existed in the Middle East between 140,000 and 120,000 years ago, when the first groups of our species had already arrived in the region.
If the data is corroborated by other findings, scenarios that explain expansion reasonable man for the planet and his relationship with other members of the human race will become much more complex than previously thought.
The careful researchers responsible for the finds did not dare to give the found fossils an official scientific name. In an article in this week’s Science magazine, just use the expression “Homo Nesher Ramla “. This is a reference to the fact that the archaic people they discovered belong to the same genus as H. sapiens and were found at the Nesher Ramla archaeological site in the center of Israel, near the West Bank.
The team, led by Israel Gershkowitz of Tel Aviv University, analyzed both the anatomy of hominin bones (a term for a group of humans today and their extinct close relatives), the Stone Age technology they used, and human remains. the animals they hunted. The overall picture of their lifestyle is very similar to what is known about the elderly. reasonable man and his cousins, Neanderthals, but the anatomical details of his bones do not match with either of these two groups, nor with other already known and baptized hominins.
“A combination of functions presented in Homo Nesher Ramla is unique. In addition, analysis of the shape of the skull and jaw places them in an intermediate position between Standing man and Neanderthals, ”explained Gershkowitz sheet by email.
You H. erectus they left Africa and began to colonize other regions of the Old World long before the emergence of our species, more than 1.5 million years ago, while the Neanderthals were more or less contemporaries of people of modern anatomy, disappearing forever in just 35,000 years. The fact that Israel’s mysterious hominins stand halfway between the two species, even living at a relatively late age, may indicate the long existence of these archaic forms in the Middle East.
So far, the Israeli team and their colleagues from other countries have found only the parietal bones (roughly the part of the skull that runs from the top of the head to the back of the neck) and the jaw. Bones and teeth are strong and the skull has a smooth, low curvature compared to the skull. reasonable manwhose skull is much more rounded.
Animal bones found at the same site indicate that the ancient inhabitants of Nesher Ramla were hunters with a variety of food, catching gazelles, deer, ostriches and even turtles.
To do this, they used stone spearheads made using the so-called Levallois technique, in which a larger stone, the so-called core, was carefully prepared by removing chips from all sides until the instrument itself was disconnected from it.
This is the same technique that has long been used by both Neanderthals and reasonable man (which would have introduced more sophisticated stone tool making systems much later).
In fact, there is no distinction between the Levallois tools of the mysterious hominids and the tools created by our species in Israel, which for researchers might indicate cultural interaction between the groups. “The different types of hominins that lived 100,000 years ago were not very different from each other in terms of their cognitive and technological capabilities,” summarizes Yossi Seidner, a researcher at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and co-author of the study.
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